4. Tracked my progress using Joe’s Goals. The more I use this website, the more I like it. I used to track these kinds of routine, habitual things using recurring tasks in Outlook but it was a bit fiddly and, addicted as I am, I didn’t have Outlook open all the time. I also used a little Post-it note on my monitor and ticked off the days, convict-style. 5. Get clothes, computer and breakfast ready the night before. Don’t want to trip over everything trying to do basic tasks when I’m half asleep. 6. Alarms. I set my bedside alarm for 0600 – and this is the clever psychology – I also set my telephone to ring at 0605 but I put the phone on the other side of the room so that I have to get out of bed to stop it ringing. In the UK, you dial *55*0605# to do this. What happens is this: either I wake up and cancel the alarm or I get up and answer the call to stop it ringing. First, we’re strongly programmed to answer the phone. Second, I’m very strongly programmed not to wake my wife up! A ringing phone will do this so I have powerful motivators at work: guilt and fear. This technique works every time but I had previously reserved it for early morning trips to the airport and things like that. 7. Naps. Sleep is like money in the bank. If you overdraw by getting up early, you have to pay in some other time. Initially, I did this by having short naps after lunch. I suspect that over time the body adjusts to less sleep – most army people get by on less sleep than the rest of us, for example – but this seems to happen over a longer period than a month. 8. Earlier nights. In the long run, going to bed an hour or so earlier and having lie-ins on weekends meant that I was getting the right amount of sleep. Like jet lag, the adjustment is a little painful but it only took a week or two to get used to the new routine. 9. Boast widely about your new early-birdiness. It makes me feel good to tell people ‘Oh, I get up at 6am’. Also, my friend Stuart says, ‘We are the stories we tell about ourselves’. If I describe myself as a punctual, early-rising, efficiency robot then maybe that’s what I’ll become (when I’m not a bohemain, enterpreneurial writer genius). Your job for today is to figure out when you can carve 30-60 minutes out of your schedule every day so that you can focus on writing.
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